If every pic on your profile is a group pic, I can totally deduce
which chick is you cuz I got logic. Also, if you're in yr profile
pic with your best friend and you're the hot one and/or your
profile pic actually misrepresents how hot you are, I can tell
you're a good person. I know the sun is bigger than the moon. That
long diatribe at the end of my profile is the 1st chapter of The
Great Gatsby. If you figured that out without reading this or
asking me why I write so much, your smart. Smarter than some people
anyways. If your good with grammar.... Ok, I'll stop being negative
now. If you're an artist or a writer and that's the first thing you
point out, I'm immediately skeptical, especially if you are oh so
cute and look well to do. It's cute though, really. That's all for
now.

Movie43. Skinny Legs and All, Grapes of Wrath and most Steinbeck,
just started Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and it's actually
really good. vonnegut, sartre, carl jung. netflix. Breaking Bad.
60's n 70's rock. 80's new wave and post-punk, old jazz, jammy Red
Sparrowes/Sigur Ros kinda stuff. vegetarian. I like my spotify list
and pandora for short bursts. I haven't bought a CD in years. I
think they're on the way out. I mostly read articles and listen to
public radio. I'm officially old now.

There's one thing that I do know. There's a lot of ruins in
Mesopotamia. Also, how much money okc makes off the random ads they
put in your account. paradoxes like wanting zen and life's
pleasures at the same time. ways to edit iPhone videos together in
iVideo. my new hobby

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some
advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just
remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the
advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually
communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a
great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve
all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to
me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The
abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality
when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in
college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was
privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the
confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep,
preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some
unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the
horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the
terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and
marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of
infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I
forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly
repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out
unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the
admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard
rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care
what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I
felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of
moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with
privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who
gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby,
who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If
personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then
there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity
to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those
intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles
away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby
impressionability which is dignified under the name of the
“creative temperament.”— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a
romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person
and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby
turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what
foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed
out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations
of men.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle
Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of
a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes
of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my
grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a
substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware
business that my father carries on to-day.
I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him —
with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that
hangs in father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a
quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I
participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great
War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back
restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle
West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe — so I decided
to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the
bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man.
All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a
prep school for me, and finally said, “Why — ye — es,” with very
grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and
after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the
spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a
warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and
friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we
take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great
idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at
eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to
Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog — at
least I had him for a few days until he ran away — and an old Dodge
and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and
muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more
recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a
guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred
on me the freedom of the neighborhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on
the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar
conviction that life was beginning over again with the
summer.
There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health
to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a
dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and
they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the
mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and
Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading
many other books besides. I was rather literary in college — one
year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the
“Yale News.”— and now I was going to bring back all such things
into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists,
the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram — life is much
more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one
of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that
slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York —
and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual
formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous
eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay,
jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the
Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.
they are not perfect ovals — like the egg in the Columbus story,
they are both crushed flat at the contact end — but their physical
resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls
that fly overhead. to the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is
their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and
size.
I lived at West Egg, the — well, the less fashionable of the two,
though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and
not a little sinister contrast between them. my house was at the
very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed
between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand
a season. the one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard
— it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy,
with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw
ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn
and garden. it was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know
Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name.
My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had
been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my
neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires — all
for eighty dollars a month.
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg
glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really
begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the
Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d
known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with
them in Chicago.
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one
of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven —
a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an
acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward
savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy — even in
college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach — but now
he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your
breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo
ponies from Lake Forest. it was hard to realize that a man in my
own generation was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France
for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there
unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.
This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I
didn’t believe it — I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt
that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for
the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to
East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their
house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful
red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The
lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a
quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and
burning gardens — finally when it reached the house drifting up the
side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The
front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with
reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom
Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the
front porch.
He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy
straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a
supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established
dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always
leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his
riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body — he
seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top
lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his
shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of
enormous leverage — a cruel body.
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of
fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt
in it, even toward people he liked — and there were men at New
Haven who had hated his guts.
“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed
to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.”
We were in the same senior society, and while we were never
intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and
wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his
own.
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
“I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing about
restlessly.
Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the
front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half
acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motor-boat that
bumped the tide offshore.
“It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.” He turned me around again,
politely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.”
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space,
fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The
windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass
outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze
blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the
other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted
wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored
rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous
couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an
anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were
rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in
after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few
moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the
groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom
Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about
the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women
ballooned slowly to the floor.
The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full
length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her
chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it
which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of
her eyes she gave no hint of it — indeed, I was almost surprised
into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming
in.
The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise — she leaned
slightly forward with a conscientious expression — then she
laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and
came forward into the room.
“I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.” She laughed again, as if she said
something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up
into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so
much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur
that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it
said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her;
an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)
At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost
imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again — the
object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given
her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my
lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a
stunned tribute from me.
I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her
low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows
up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will
never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright
things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there
was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found
difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a
promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since
and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next
hour.
I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way
East, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.
“Do they miss me?” she cried ecstatically.
“The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel
painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail
all night along the north shore.”
“How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. To-morrow!” Then she added
irrelevantly: “You ought to see the baby.”
“I’d like to.”
“She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen
her?”
“Never.”
“Well, you ought to see her. She’s ——”
Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room,
stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.
“What you doing, Nick?”
“I’m a bond man.”
“Who with?”
I told him.
“Never heard of them,” he remarked decisively.
This annoyed me.
“You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the
East.”
“Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing at
Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more.
“I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.”
At this point Miss Baker said: “Absolutely!” with such suddenness
that I started — it was the first word she uttered since I came
into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for
she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into
the room.
“I’m stiff,” she complained, “I’ve been lying on that sofa for as
long as I can remember.”
“Don’t look at me,” Daisy retorted, “I’ve been trying to get you to
New York all afternoon.”
“No, thanks,” said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from
the pantry, “I’m absolutely in training.”
Her host looked at her incredulously.
“You are!” He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the
bottom of a glass. “How you ever get anything done is beyond
me.”
I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she “got done.” I
enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl,
with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body
backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her gray sun-strained
eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a
wan, charming, discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had
seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.
“You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously. “I know
somebody there.”
“I don’t know a single ——”
“You must know Gatsby.”
“Gatsby?” demanded Daisy. “What Gatsby?”
Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced;
wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan
compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to
another square.
Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the
two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch, open
toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the
diminished wind.
“Why candles?” objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with
her fingers. “In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.”
She looked at us all radiantly. “Do you always watch for the
longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the
longest day in the year and then miss it.”
“We ought to plan something,” yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at
the table as if she were getting into bed.
“All right,” said Daisy. “What’ll we plan?” She turned to me
helplessly: “What do people plan?”
Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on
her little finger.
“Look!” she complained; “I hurt it.”
We all looked — the knuckle was black and blue.
“You did it, Tom,” she said accusingly. “I know you didn’t mean to,
but you did do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man,
a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a ——”
“I hate that word hulking,” objected Tom crossly, “even in
kidding.”
“Hulking,” insisted Daisy.
Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with
a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as
cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the
absence of all desire. They were here, and they accepted Tom and
me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be
entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a
little later the evening too would be over and casually put away.
It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was
hurried from phase to phase toward its close, in a continually
disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the
moment itself.
“You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,” I confessed on my second
glass of corky but rather impressive claret. “Can’t you talk about
crops or something?”
I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up
in an unexpected way.
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve
gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The
Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea
is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly
submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of
unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them.
What was that word we ——”
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at
her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s
up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other
races will have control of things.”
“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously
toward the fervent sun.
“You ought to live in California —” began Miss Baker, but Tom
interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.
“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are,
and ——” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a
slight nod, and she winked at me again. “— And we’ve produced all
the things that go to make civilization — oh, science and art, and
all that. Do you see?”
There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his
complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any
more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the
butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption
and leaned toward me.
“I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered enthusiastically.
“It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the
butler’s nose?”
“That’s why I came over to-night.”
“Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher
for some people in New York that had a silver service for two
hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night, until
finally it began to affect his nose ——”
“Things went from bad to worse,” suggested Miss Baker.
“Yes. Things went from bad to worse, until finally he had to give
up his position.”
For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon
her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I
listened — then the glow faded, each light deserting her with
lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at
dusk.
The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom’s ear,
whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair, and without a word
went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her,
Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.
“I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a — of a
rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?” She turned to Miss Baker for
confirmation: “An absolute rose?”
This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only
extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her
heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those
breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on
the table and excused herself and went into the house.
Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of
meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said
“Sh!” in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible
in the room beyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward unashamed, trying
to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down,
mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.
“This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor ——” I said.
“Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens.”
“Is something happening?” I inquired innocently.
“You mean to say you don’t know?” said Miss Baker, honestly
surprised. “I thought everybody knew.”
“I don’t.”
“Why ——” she said hesitantly, “Tom’s got some woman in New
York.”
“Got some woman?” I repeated blankly.
Miss Baker nodded.
“She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time.
Don’t you think?”
Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a
dress and the crunch of leather boots, and Tom and Daisy were back
at the table.
“It couldn’t be helped!” cried Daisy with tense gaiety.
She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me, and
continued: “I looked outdoors for a minute, and it’s very romantic
outdoors. There’s a bird on the lawn that I think must be a
nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He’s
singing away ——” Her voice sang: “It’s romantic, isn’t it,
Tom?”
“Very romantic,” he said, and then miserably to me: “If it’s light
enough after dinner, I want to take you down to the stables.”
The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head
decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects,
vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five
minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again,
pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at
every one, and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t guess what Daisy
and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed
to have mastered a certain hardy scepticism, was able utterly to
put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a
certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing — my
own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.
The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss
Baker, with several feet of twilight between them, strolled back
into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible
body, while, trying to look pleasantly interested and a little
deaf, I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the
porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a
wicker settee.
Daisy took her face in her hands as if feeling its lovely shape,
and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that
turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would
be some sedative questions about her little girl.
“We don’t know each other very well, Nick,” she said suddenly.
“Even if we are cousins. You didn’t come to my wedding.”
“I wasn’t back from the war.”
“That’s true.” She hesitated. “Well, I’ve had a very bad time,
Nick, and I’m pretty cynical about everything.”
Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn’t say any
more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of
her daughter.
“I suppose she talks, and — eats, and everything.”
“Oh, yes.” She looked at me absently. “Listen, Nick; let me tell
you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?”
“Very much.”
“It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about — things. Well, she
was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up
out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the
nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a
girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘all right,’ I said,
‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the
best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little
fool.”
“You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,” she went on in a
convinced way. “Everybody thinks so — the most advanced people. And
I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done
everything.” Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather
like Tom’s, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. “Sophisticated —
God, I’m sophisticated!”
The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my
belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made
me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some
sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure
enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her
lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather
distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.
Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light.
Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read
aloud to him from the Saturday Evening Post.— the words, murmurous
and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The
lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow
of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a
flutter of slender muscles in her arms.
When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted
hand.
“To be continued,” she said, tossing the magazine on the table, “in
our very next issue.”
Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and
she stood up.
“Ten o’clock,” she remarked, apparently finding the time on the
ceiling. “Time for this good girl to go to bed.”
“Jordan’s going to play in the tournament to-morrow,” explained
Daisy, “over at Westchester.”
“Oh — you’re Jordan Baker.”
I knew now why her face was familiar — its pleasing contemptuous
expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of
the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I
had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but
what it was I had forgotten long ago.
“Good night,” she said softly. “Wake me at eight, won’t you.”
“If you’ll get up.”
“I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.”
“Of course you will,” confirmed Daisy. “In fact I think I’ll
arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of — oh —
fling you together. You know — lock you up accidentally in linen
closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of
thing ——”
“Good night,” called Miss Baker from the stairs. “I haven’t heard a
word.”
“She’s a nice girl,” said Tom after a moment. “They oughtn’t to let
her run around the country this way.”
“Who oughtn’t to?” inquired Daisy coldly.
“Her family.”
“Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick’s
going to look after her, aren’t you, Nick? She’s going to spend
lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence
will be very good for her.”
Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.
“Is she from New York?” I asked quickly.
“From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our
beautiful white ——”
“Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?”
demanded Tom suddenly.
“Did I?” She looked at me.
“I can’t seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic
race. Yes, I’m sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first
thing you know ——”
“Don’t believe everything you hear, Nick,” he advised me.
I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes
later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood
side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor
Daisy peremptorily called: “Wait!”
“I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important. We heard you
were engaged to a girl out West.”
“That’s right,” corroborated Tom kindly. “We heard that you were
engaged.”
“It’s libel. I’m too poor.”
“But we heard it,” insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up
again in a flower-like way. “We heard it from three people, so it
must be true.”
Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn’t even
vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was
one of the reasons I had come East. You can’t stop going with an
old friend on account of rumors, and on the other hand I had no
intention of being rumored into marriage.
Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich —
nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove
away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush
out of the house, child in arms — but apparently there were no such
intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he “had some
woman in New York.” was really less surprising than that he had
been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the
edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer
nourished his peremptory heart.
Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of
wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light,
and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its
shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard.
The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings
beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full
bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of
a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to
watch it, I saw that I was not alone — fifty feet away a figure had
emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing
with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the
stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position
of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself,
come out to determine what share was his of our local
heavens.
I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner,
and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him,
for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone —
he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way,
and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling.
Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except
a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the
end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished,
and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.